After the Sizzle   I got this back from a pal about the Earl bit. It is nice, and below it is my response:   Thanks JR–a real treat for a Michigan guy like me, but saddening.  While you were hobnobbing with the headquarters guys, my neighbors were the tool-and-die makers (i.e. the top […]

17 November 2002   There is a commercial running on the tube these days, part of the hype for the Detroit�s new model year. It features a guy in a fedora who says his name is Harley Earl, and wants to sell you a car.   The New Year in Motown is not what it […]

The Fountain in the Moonlight Square   One year ago the Taliban quit Kabul, heading south before the forces of the Northern Alliance and American Special Forces. Tonight Virginia will execute Mir Amal Kazi, the Pakistani who gunned down five CIA employees as they waited at the red light on Route 123 outside the main […]

Half a World Away I was listening to the radio in my bed. It is dark and there is a chill in the breeze through my open window. It is 0500 on Sunday, a travel day, the end of which will not come for me until I am more than half a world away. I […]

The Agreed Framework   The North Koreans lied to us.   Imagine that! Last night the very self-possessed State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told the nation that the Agreed Framework had been abrogated by the North, that they had continued an offensive weapons program to develop nuclear weapons. He stunning revelation came in the midst […]

Target The morning dawns brilliant today. We are celebrating our Italian heritage and have taken the day off from the busy affairs of the Government. Other Governments and Non-Governmental actors have not. I hear from London that Joint Rule in Ireland has been suspended, and Mr. Blair has reasserted direct rule from the old imperial […]

Life in the Big City   I don�t know what that means. We are following the sniper story with a certain detachment and grim fascination. The seventh and eighth shootings have not brought our boy to closure. I am presuming here, but I’m fairly sure our “boy” is just that. A hunter who has graduated […]

Cabin in the Woods   Michigan is playing Notre Dame today down at South Bend. I wish it was at the Big House in Ann Arbor. That would be the place to renew the rivalry. They haven’t met in a few years, schedules and contracts and all that. Michigan goes in ranked number seven in […]

Saturated The nice people on NPR tell me this will be a fine day, high seventies, breezy and pleasant. Another wonderful day. I left work early yesterday and went to Arlington. I stopped at the Harris Teeter over at Pentagon City to buy flowers and drove up to the  front gate at Ft. Myer.   […]